AWS re:Invent 2018: Global Partner Summit Keynote Recap

AWS re:Invent 2018 kicked off with the Global Partner Summit Keynote this morning, where many interesting data points about the growth of the global partner ecosystem were shared by Terry Wise, along with a vision of the future from Andy Jassy.

This was the 7th Global partner summit, and given the incredible range of solutions created by AWS partners and the growth of AWS, the summit is now 10 times larger than at its inception, and the partner ecosystem is 30 times larger! AWS has grown 46% since 2017, thousands of new customers have been gained, and this momentum has been driven, to a large degree, by AWS -partners like 2nd Watch.

Strategic partnerships are also key to AWS’ business scale. New AWS instance types with up 12TB of memory are available to support SAP HANA, and AWS is now the #1 location to run SAP, even over on-premises! The VMware Cloud on AWS offering now has the support of over 200 partners, and customer success stories about the ease of migration are racking up. Also, worldwide share of hosting Windows workloads are growing, and AWS hosts 57%, compared to 30% and 11% on Azure and other solutions, respectively.

During this session there was a focus on the AWS marketplace, which has greatly expanded in its role to help connect partners to clients. AWS noted that there are now 950K subscriptions to partner solutions. There have also been 100 new software vendors this year and 300 new product listings. In addition, there is the new AWS Solution space, which features solutions built for featured use cases by AWS Competency Partners like 2nd Watch.

Both Terry Wise and Andy Jassy gave insights into the areas where partners will be critical to success and adoption of AWS in the future. Some of the highlights included:

AI and ML: Over the next 5 years adoption and integration of these services is set to rapidly expand.

Serverless: The basic unit of compute is getting smaller, with container services like ECS and EKS growing quickly, as well as management of containers with Fargate expanding. There is also adoption of event driven serverless solutions. This microservice architecture uses smaller components for better performance and lower cost. Also, AWS expanded the AWS Competency Program to include Container Competency for ECS and ECS for Kubernetes designations.

AWS Connect: Call center services are seeing fast adoption, and the service is enabling a great reduction in call volume.

Data management: Clients need help with getting data into the cloud, including a proper landing zone with a secure multi account environment. This is a daunting task that clients get paralyzed with and/or don’t implement solutions with guard rails or security services. Partners can help implement data lakes to transform the data and take advantage of the analytics and machine learning capabilities in AWS.

AWS SaaS Factory: The AWS SaaS Factory program provides a broad range of business and technical enablement resources for building, migrating, and optimizing software-as-a-service (SaaS) on AWS. This allows a secure solution for multi-tenant architectures.

AR, VR, IoT: These emerging technologies are maturing and ripe for third parties to develop solutions and will soon become mainstream.

Despite these advanced services, the consensus is that the industry is currently into the meat of public cloud adoption. Businesses need help with migration solutions, including portfolio assessment and mass migration. This is expected to expand as the economy grows.

The key takeaway is that partners innovate on behalf of the client and create long term relationships that help clients take advantage of the fast pace of AWS service enhancements. To see how 2nd Watch can do this for you, contact us.